All Quotes

"My thoughts ran a wool-gathering; and I did like the countryman who looked for his ass while he was mounted on his back."

"Liberty ... is one of the most valuable blessings that Heaven has bestowed upon mankind."

"As they use to say, spick and span new."

"I think it a very happy accident."

"There is no greater folly in this world than for a man to despair."

"I shall be as secret as the grave."

"Well, now, there's a remedy for everything except death."

"Now, blessings light on him that first invented this same sleep! It covers a man all over, thoughts and all, like a cloak; it is meat for the hungry, drink for the thirsty, heat for the cold, and cold for the hot. It is the current coin that purchases all the pleasures of the world cheap, and the balance that sets the king and the shepherd, the fool and the wise man, even."

"Rome was not built in a day."

"The ass will carry his load, but not a double load; ride not a free horse to death."

"He has done like Orbaneja, the painter of Ubeda, who, being asked what he painted, answered, "Whatever it may turn out." And if he chanced to paint a cock, he wrote under it, "This is a cock," lest the people should take it for a fox."

"He ... got the better of himself, and that's the best kind of victory one can wish for."

"Every man was not born with a silver spoon in his mouth."

"Never look for birds of this year in the nests of the last."

"There is a strange charm in the thoughts of a good legacy, or the hopes of an estate, which wondrously alleviates the sorrow that men would otherwise feel for the death of friends."

"For if he like a madman lived, At least he like a wise one died."

"No te asotiles tanto, que te despuntarás..."

"Para con ella es de cera mi alma, donde podrá imprimir lo que quisiere, y para conservarlo y guardarlo, no será como impreso en cera, sino como esculpido en mámoles, cuya dureza se opone á la duración de los tiempos."

"Aun entre los demonios hay unos peores que otros, y entre muchos malos hombres suele haber alguno bueno."

"Se dará tiempo al tiempo, que suele dar dulce salida a muchas amargas difficultades."

"Yo no soy bueno para palacio, porque tengo vergüenza y no sé lisonjear."

"Los buenos artistas imitan la naturaleza; los malos, la vomitan."

"Por las cosas que dicen que dije cuando loco, podéis considerar las que diré y haré cuando cuerdo."

"Vete a la lengua, que en ella consisten los mayores daños de la humana vida."

"Mueren muchos más de los confiados que de los recatados."

"Ambición es, pero ambiciòn generosa, la del que pretende mejorar su estado sin perjuicio de tercero."

"Pocas o ninguna vez se cumple con la ambición que no sea con daño de tercero."

"El andar en tierras y comunicar con diversas gentes, hace a los hombres discretos."

"En los grandes perigros, la poca esperanza de vencerlos saca del ánimo desesperadas fuerzas."

"Un buen arrepentimiento es la mejor medicina que tienen las enfermedades del alma."

"Puede haber amor sin celos, pero no sin temores."

"While clearly a masterpiece, Don Quixote suffers from one fairly serious flaw — that of outright unreadability. This reviewer should know, because he has just read it. ... Looming like one of the Don's chimerical adversaries, it is a giant...But the giant has a giant weight problem and is elderly, and soft-brained. Reading Don Quixote can be compared to an indefinite visit from your most impossible senior relative, with all his pranks, dirty habits, unstoppable reminiscences, and terrible cronies. When the experience is over, and the old boy checks out at last (on page 846 — the prose wedged tight, with no breaks for dialogue), you will shed tears all right; not tears of relief or regret but tears of pride. You made it, despite all that Don Quixote could do."

"Cervantes, Don Quixote — I read that every year, as some do the Bible."

"I think it's a new feature. Don't tell anyone it was an accident."

"It's there as a sop to former Ada programmers."

"The Golden Age of Spain (mid-sixteenth to mid-seventeenth centuries) saw a certain reaction against the generally antifemale attitude characteristic of the Middle Ages. Both Cervantes (1547-1616) and Lope de Vega (1562-1635) often depicted women not as weak, wicked, and lecherous, but as strong, heroic, and virtuous; and both admired their contemporary St. Teresa of Avila (1515-1582)..."

"The biography of Cervantes provides an extremely typical example of what could befall a man living during the transition from romantic chivalry to realism. Without knowing this story it is impossible to appreciate Don Quixote sociologically. ... The parodying of chivalry was no new thing in his lifetime ... In Italy, where knighthood was represented to some extent by middle-class elements, the new chivalry did not take itself quite seriously. It was doubtless here, that Cervantes was prepared for his sceptical attitude, here in the home of liberalism and humanism, and it was to Italian literature that he probably owed the first suggestion for his epoch-making joke. His work was not intended, however, merely to take a rise out of the artificial and mechanical novels of fashion, nor to become merely a criticism of out-of-date chivalry, but also to be an indictment of the world of the disenchanted, matter-of-fact reality, in which there was nothing left for an idealist but to dig himself in behind his idée fixe. The novelty in Cervantes' work was, therefore, not the ironic treatment of the chivalrous attitude to life, but the relativizing of the two worlds of romantic idealism and realistic rationalism. What was new was the indissoluble dualism of his world-view, the idea of the impossibility of realizing the idea in the world of reality and of reducing reality to the idea. ... He wavers between the justification of un-worldly idealism and of worldly-wise common sense. From that arises his own conflicting attitude toward his hero. Before Cervantes there had only been good and bad characters, deliverers and traitors, saints and blasphemers, in literature; here the hero is saint and fool in one and the same person."

"Of all the books of fiction, I know none that equals Cervantes's History of Don Quixote in usefulness, pleasantry, and a constant decorum."

"It will probably never be possible to prove that Cervantes was a cristiano nuevo, but the circumstantial evidence seems compelling. The Instruccion written by Fernan Diaz de Toledo in the mid-fifteenth century lists the Cervantes family as among the many noble clans of Spain that were of converso origin."

"Is there a better book about dreaming oneself into a new life?"

"The greatest height of heroism to which an individual, like a people, can attain is to know how to face ridicule; better still, to know how to make oneself ridiculous and not to shrink from the ridicule."

"El uso estropea y hasta destruye toda belleza. La función más noble de los objetos es la de ser contemplados."

"All of this that is happening to me, and happening to others about me, is it reality or is it fiction? May not all of it perhaps be a dream of God, or of whomever it may be, which will vanish as soon as He wakes? And therefore when we pray to Him, and cause canticles and hymns to rise to Him, is it not that we may lull Him to sleep, rocking the cradle of His dreams? Is not the whole liturgy, of all religions, only a way perhaps of soothing God in His dreams, so that He shall not wake and cease to dream us?"

"Whenever a man talks he lies, and so far as he talks to himself — that is to say, so far as he thinks, knowing that he thinks — he lies to himself. The only truth in human life is that which is physiological. Speech — this thing that they call a social product — was made for lying."

"We men do nothing but lie and make ourselves important. Speech was invented for the purpose of magnifying all of our sensations and impressions — perhaps so that we could believe in them."

"The devil is an angel too."

"There are pretenses which are very sincere, and marriage is their school."

"Isolation is the worst possible counselor."

"Every peasant has a lawyer inside of him, just as every lawyer, no matter how urbane he may be, carries a peasant within himself."

"It is sad not to be loved, but it is much sadder not to be able to love."